Terrorising a client as professional misconduct (Punjab case, 65 L.J. 619)

The statutory words are professional or other misconduct, and their width is the point of this decision. The disciplinary jurisdiction is not confined to how an advocate conducts a case before the court. The roll is a warrant of character as well as of competence, and the advocate's relation to his own client is as much within the jurisdiction as his relation to the court.

This is also the course's illustration of the heaviest punishment actually imposed, which makes it the natural case to cite on the sanctions available.

An advocate appearing for the defence in a criminal case terrorised his client.

Held, this was professional misconduct. The advocate was barred from practising.

The course gives no discussion of reasons, and an answer should not supply any. What the decision establishes can be put in three steps.

1. The conduct complained of was not a failure in the conduct of the litigation — no default before the court is alleged. It was the advocate's treatment of the client.
2. The statutory words reach it. Professional or other misconduct is wider than the advocate's professional performance, so conduct towards the client, and indeed conduct that does not occur in court at all, is within the jurisdiction.
3. The punishment followed the gravity. The client of a defence advocate in a criminal case is at the advocate's mercy in the plainest way, and the sanction was removal from practice rather than reprimand or suspension.

Set that beside the illustration of gross negligence, where the advocate's default was in the conduct of the case and the aggravating feature was his misleading of the client. The two decisions mark out the two axes on which misconduct is found: what the advocate does in the case, and what he does to the client.

Cite it for the width of professional or other misconduct, and for the proposition that an advocate's dealings with his own client are within the disciplinary jurisdiction.

Cite it on punishment. Under s. 35(3) the disciplinary committee may dismiss the complaint, reprimand the advocate, suspend him from practice for such period as it deems fit, or remove his name from the State roll; this decision is the course's example of the last and heaviest of those. Remember the appellate route that follows — s. 37 to the Bar Council of India, s. 38 to the Supreme Court within sixty days, with no automatic stay under s. 40 — and the one-year limit on the State committee under s. 36B.

Use it also on the composition question, since the tribunal matters as much as the test: a disciplinary committee of three, two elected from within the Council and one co-opted advocate of ten years' standing who is not a member of the Council, with the senior-most advocate as Chairman by operation of the section; and the Advocate-General of the State heard in every disciplinary case.

What it does not decide: the course records no facts beyond the terrorising of the client, so do not build a definition of the offence on it. It supplies an illustration of the reach of the section, not a test.